3. Cause tree

"Arbre des causes" would have been an appropriate name for the fault tree described above. However, since the INRS (Institut national de recherche et de sécurité) carried out a major project in the early 1970s to develop and promote a tool for the analysis of accidents in the workplace, the representation of an a posteriori analysis of an accident or incident described here is known as a "cause tree".

If we had a complete fault tree, any cause tree would have to be a subset of the fault tree, since the accident under study would have to be the realization of one of the possibilities described by the fault tree.

The cause tree is more a method of organizing and analyzing the information gathered about an accident, than a guide to gathering information. The orderly nature of the tree representation may draw attention to a gap in the information....